Tired of the rough, frizzy, and slow growth of beard hair, the husband goes to Google to search for products that can aid his beard growth. The search results left him scratching his head since there were no such products. Sadly, what he ordered next was a tub of Loreal’Paris Hair Spa specially designed for women’s hair and somewhat was close to serving his concern of frizzy beard hair.
Another hilarious incident happened when a sister found her acne cream tube empty only to find that her brother was using the same secretly.
The incidents mentioned above are not rare. There will be a myriad of products from numerous brands for almost every skin and hair concern for women but there is a handful for men. The Indian TV showcases plenty of commercials showcasing women’s grooming products right from lightening the skin tone to the removal of pimples to age reversal through the skin while the men over the years are consoled with shaving razors giving minimum cuts.
Grooming products catering to men largely come from the generic healthcare and women’s grooming brands and the options have been limited to date. Realising this to be an opportunity three friends Parvesh Bareja, Hitesh Dhingra, and Bhisham Bhateja founded The Man Company in 2015. The Man Company is an online exclusive men’s grooming essentials startup that covers a “head-to-toe” range of men’s grooming products starting from hair, face, body, and bath, beard, shaving, skincare, and fragrances infused with essential oils. The products are SLS, paraben-free, and free of chemicals that in general are found in personal care and grooming products harming the hair and skin.
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Grooming products catering to men largely come from the generic healthcare and women’s grooming brands and the options have been limited to date.
The Man Company – becoming a digitally native brand with Shopify
The Man Company decided to cater to the millennial user base of 26-35 aged men. This millennial user base is digital natives who have witnessed the emergence of new technologies and gadgets and how it has simplified the lives of people, making them firm believers of it. This led the startup to envision as a digitally native brand and decided to use Canadian e-commerce enabler Shopify to build its online store. Within two weeks The Man Company had its digital storefront up and running.
The Man Company’s search problem
That one pocket in your pants or trousers might not have a wallet but will certainly have a smartphone. Be it finding the new meaning of a word or finding a new cafe the first step we take is to search. When The Man Company wanted to launch its store online, it wanted the brand’s searchability to be high. It wanted to enhance its customer shopping experience to bring more conversions in its Shopify store with a powerful site search.
How SearchTap helped with a powerful site search
SearchTap is a subscription-based hosted search solution that enhances brand searchability for users on mobile devices as desktops and tablets. This feature is compatible with businesses whose digital storefront is built on Shopify. The product images, filters, and product descriptions are all search optimised and presents in mobile responsive layouts to increase user engagement and conversions.
It has features like search-as-you-type, location-based results multiple language support, and relevance customization. In addition to this, the search platform also comes with an “All in one” integrated dashboard that extracts inferences from user behaviour and search trends history to show businesses the whole story that lives within the search data.
The Man Company wanted to give unique look to the search box and results page on desktop and mobile. This integration made the search bar easily accessible for visitors who came to the digital store. It made the search highly customisable based on concerns, product type, collections, etc., and gave the freedom to add as many filters as possible on the website. With every search, the website showed products with detailed information of their products further offering a smooth buying experience to the buyers. SearchTap’s superior language modelling ensured that the users can see relevant results from the first letter typed. Its search-as-you-type technology also delivered search results at a lightning speed making the search experience even more seamless.
If any customer mistakenly typed something that is not offered by The Man Company, the SearchTap powered website instead of displaying a blank page it showed popular categories. This meant that these users could further interact with the site and might find something else that they like.
The search analytics from SearchTap aided the startup to know about popular and zero-result search terms that can be further used to make the website content more search-friendly.
SearchTap’s enhanced mobile search experience led to a 26 percent surge in search-led revenue of The Man Company and a 43 percent increase in transactions by search users. The startups experienced a 36 percent growth in Mobile Search Users and a 13 percent increase in Mobile Conversion Rate.
Boosting loyalty and repeat purchases
The Man Company received thousands of orders in a single day but at the same time, it found a significant number of cart withdrawals and cancellations due to various reasons. This is when the startup thought to build consumer loyalty and bring repeat purchases on the platform by building a store credit system as soon as the customers placed an order.
They categorised their customers based on their interaction with the brand and thought of gamifying the rewards and loyalty programme. They wanted to create an interactive customer account page with added features to enable customer loyalty, gamify experiences and drive more repeat purchases. For this, The Man Company integrated its store with Flits, a customer account page that is available as an app on Shopify’s app store. The app summarises all shopper data like profile, order history, recently viewed products, and delivery addresses in one place.
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The Man Company received thousands of orders in a single day but at the same time, it found a significant number of cart withdrawals and cancellations due to various reasons.
Setting up the customer loyalty programme with the Flits app
The Man Company designed a tiered rewards programme wherein customers would receive credits only after the order was successfully fulfilled. If the customer cancels/ returns the purchase they make, the store credits would be automatically revoked. The Flits app was integrated with Shopify Flow to give a tier-based rewards program and customisations to the customer account page were made. They built a system to adjust the store credits of customers who cancelled or returned orders that enabled the brand to save on losses that they could have incurred due to high disbursement of rewards and an equally high return/ cancellation rate.
They also renamed the rewards programme ‘The Man Wallet’ using the multi-language feature of the Flits app. This helped the brand to personalise the rewards programme and also bring it along with the same lines as the overall customer account page experience.
The introduction of store credits in customer account pages to boost repeat purchases resulted in a 41 percent increase in orders using store credits, a 91 percent increase in average order value with store credit, and a massive 327 percent increase in store credit spend in the lockdown.
What can the businesses learn from The Man Company?
Instead of investing in various engagement strategies on the website, it simply introduced a loyalty programme to gamify the experience of shoppers. Its tiered rewards programme on its Shopify store kept its customers coming back to the store more resulting in higher customer retention rates and a surge in sales.
